One story by Chandler Groover

A FAT CAT AND SOME BIRDS
By Chandler Groover

“Oh, tosh!” hissed the cat, and he lashed his tail. “I’ve no interest in entertaining birds.”

He was a feline of girth, reclined on a windowsill, with one paw absently skimming a saucer of milk. His hindquarters made up most of his body.

“But we so want to know!” both canaries twittered from the cage hanging just inside.

“It wouldn’t benefit me.”

“It would please us to hear!”

“Fine,” said the cat, “but I’ve warned you.

“One dark and stormy night, there was a tapping at the glass. Just here, as a matter of fact, at this very window. It was a little sparrow, lost in the rain and pleading his precious heart away for sanctuary. I, of course, was singularly aware of his plight – the mister and missus have the most abominable hearing imaginable. And, being the philanthropist that my purebred stature demands of me, I let him in.

“He was a most wretched creature, dripping with rainwater so that his feathers seemed slime on his quivering frame. I gathered him up in some terrycloth that I robbed from the bathroom and warmed him by the hearth, thereby gaining his eternal gratitude and trust.

‘Oh, I’ve flown in from Newberry, and the weather went foul,’ he told me.

“But I comforted him, and even parted with a kernel of food from my dish so that his starvation might be sated.

“Yet as soon as his spirits seemed about to return, he was sighted by both of my human relations, seized, and locked away in your very cage, never to look upon his homeland again! How miserable he was then. It was a sad, pathetic sight, and I determined to spare him his tragedy. In the dead of night, I loosed the prison door.”

“To save him?” asked the canaries.

“To consume him,” yawned the cat.

Both of the tiny birds bristled in horror.

“Why then, you might ask, did I treat him hospitably to begin with? For good sportsmanship, of course. And as for you,” he pushed his milk aside, “it’s due time for a jailbreak.”

Author bio:

A recent graduate of the University of Georgia, Chandler Groover is an aspiring writer currently living in Athens.